Sliding Through Overwhelm

Overwhelm is a very interesting place to visit, but I am not really excited to be here!! Unfortunately, overwhelm seems to be a place that most big transformations take you through at least once on the journey to something new. It is almost a necessary step towards clarity! A time to shake away old thoughts, old beliefs, and old habits. A time to cut them loose and open up space to allow the new thoughts, beliefs and habits to come in.

For me, my journey of transformation revolves around writing a book. But not just any book. This book will be the foundation, the cornerstone on which a whole bunch of new ways for me reach out and help people stuck in the middle of their own desire for transformation will be built. So I recently began writing my book, seriously writing my book this time, with a firm publishing deadline of January 19th 2016 – and not a day later. I say ‘seriously’ because writing a book is something I have been doing in my mind for several years now. I have even developed some really strong thought habits around what writing a book looks like and feels like. About what the transformation of from working in an office to being a published author would look like and feel like.

And this, what I am going through right now, is seriously not what I expected!! And that seems to be the way it is with most major, important transitions!! They don’t happen like they are supposed to happen!! At least, they don’t happen as we planned them to happen.

The program that I am writing this book through, is a brilliant program. I know it will work and I also know that once the dust settles and this part of the process is completed, everything will flow more strongly and more beautifully that even I can imagine right now. That is how well processed transformations work!! Not always along the path you expected to follow, but when the transformation is properly aligned with who you really are, the process always takes you to where you are meant to be.

But, in the meantime, what I have found is that I have arrived at that point in the process where I’m looking around and thinking, Ohhh, that would go nicely in my book but first I would need to read this book, that book and another book before I can write knowledgeably about this topic, because, well, obviously, I don’t know enough already to write a brilliant book, so let me start reading this book, but there is an online workshop I want to be on today, and an ad for my new program that I am excited to write, and an article that would work perfectly for the upcoming issue of my favorite magazine, and these changes I need to make to my website, ooooh and I do want to begin creating my new program, because it’s brilliant…….Yes, when I am in overwhelm I tend to think in very long run on sentences, which tends to make things worse because they create a momentum, kinda like a runaway train that gets increasingly hard to stop but is oh so much fun to be on!!

I have a feeling that you know what I mean.

That feeling of being so caught up in the overwhelm that it becomes impossible to make any progress. Each thought you have becomes a shiny new object that you so desperately want to follow, not because the thought is necessarily brilliant (but, yeah they are!!), but because the thoughts become something to focus on to distract you from what you should be doing because you are not sure how to move forward because of the overwhelm.

I know what triggered my overwhelm this time. The book I thought I was going to write, the book I had been thinking about for so long, is, in fact, not the book I will be writing. And this has lead to self-doubt, that I am not prepared enough! That I’m an imposter! That I need to read more! That there are so many other books out there that are so much better than mine could ever be!……..I know that the book I will be writing is so much more than I had expected it would be and that is a wee bit frightening!! So I procrastinate.

Time to take Martha Beck’s wise council into consideration and plot out some turtle steps. One small step to shift the direction of my thoughts so they move out of the overwhelm. One small success to lead to the next success. Build on the momentum of small successes to create a solid path in the right direction that will take me out of the overwhelm and back onto my ideal path.

Yes, OK. Off to do a Tarot reading – my one small step leading me out of the overwhelm.

What first small step do you take to help you slide out of the overwhelm?